


Pass

by somekindofseizure



Category: The X files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 11:32:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14236368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure
Summary: Because I watched the pilot after (the finale).





	Pass

“I’m going for a run, wanna come?”

“Pass,” she says and pretends to yawn. She doesn’t know why she does it. 

“Come on. It’ll help you unwind. I’ll lend you a pair of sneakers.”

“I have sneakers.”

The first few days of a job are always the most tiring, and though she’s technically not new, this is. All-day arguments with Oxford geniuses, turbulence en route to places she’s never been, rolling coffins and exhumed bodies. A run does sound nice. She’d like to unwind. She doesn’t go for him.

She tells him to wait five minutes, takes her glasses off, squirms into a sports bra, pulls her hair into a ponytail. She reaches for her tube of lipstick and tells herself her circadian rhythm is all off when she realizes the mistake. She tells herself it’s not because of him, unaware she’ll be saying this for the next seven years. In the morning picking out perfume. In shiny basement lemon-scented bathrooms that no one but her uses, in motel rooms and airports and passenger seats of government issued rental cars as she wipes the drool from the corner of her lip. Not for him.

“No work stuff,” she says as she scampers out. He’s still wearing a goofy grin and a backwards hat, an affectation she doesn’t understand. There’s no sun to keep off his neck. There’s no long hair to keep off his face. She doesn’t realize an equally resilient matching it’s-not-for-her routine was born five minutes ago in the room next door.

It’s darker than she expected outside, pitch black within twenty paces of the building. She thinks of what could be lurking out in the forest and it terrifies her, thrills her, and then embarrasses her when she realizes she wouldn’t be out here alone. ‘Take one of your brothers,’ her mother used to say and it would piss her off, but now here she is feeling safe beside someone she doesn’t know at all, someone who seems certifiably insane, simply because he’s six feet tall and has testicles. Who knows what’s lurking out there, but he, well he is right here, he should be risk enough. 

They find a rhythm quickly, their footfalls syncopating with the same strange ease they’ve had since they met. He argues with her as though they’ve known each other their whole lives. He shows her his raw excitement, snapping photographs and beaming like a kid at Christmas. She talks relentless sense at him as though his fate matters to her, as though it wouldn’t be as simple as nodding along and reporting back. And they run in tandem as though they’re practicing for a lifetime of it.

Her eyes adjust and she feels her whole body relax, feels herself disappear. He hasn’t said a word and she worries she seemed overly stringent when she prohibited him from talking about the case at the start. Then she balks at the idea that someone so smart and so charming would have nothing else to talk about. But then, she hasn’t spoken either.

“I thought you’d be faster,” she says. His breath is visible as he laughs beside her and then breathes it back in. “You have much longer legs.”

“You weigh less.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Less to carry.”

“Well, Mulder, that’s proportionate. And anyway you have no idea how much I weigh.”

She’s talking just to talk, being contrarian and she knows it but if she stops she’ll just hear their feet and their breathing and she’s afraid of what it’s doing to her, the way it’s sending her on a ride and taking her home at once. She tells herself it’s the loamy air dangling off the western edge of the country, full of frogs and insects and insolent fog rubbing its hands together for morning. She tells herself she has to get out more. She tells herself it’s not him.

He stops and grabs her and her heart nearly stops. She’s eye level with him now, feet kicking a foot off the ground, gripped tight around the waist. 

“What are you –“ But she knows what he’s doing. She’s being coy and she’s never coy and she still thinks it’s not for him. He changes his grip to let her down, switches from hands at her sides to arm around her waist and lets her slide down the front of his body to soften the impact. 

He steps back and his eyes glitter midnight gold with a challenge.

“Can you do me?”

Lift him, he means, but she feels herself blush and she wants to bury herself right there in the packed dirt path they’ve moved onto to avoid getting hit by a car. She reminds herself he can’t see her. Not unless her cheeks are as bright as his eyes.

“Point taken.” She starts jogging again. “I don’t like to be picked up.”

“I’m sorry,” he says with surprising sincerity and she feels bad for making him feel bad because she doesn’t really dislike being picked up all that much, but it’s too late so she stands her ground on that point.

“It’s all right,” she says and her voice comes out warm and smooth and melts down her chin like honey. It’s not for him, she tells herself.

They run three miles without saying another word. She listens. Listens harder. Listens deeper. Listens so deep she can almost hear his heartbeat. She wonders what he can hear – her nervousness and her boldness, her stomach growling and her left elbow cricking, her brain ticking between her ears and the pulsing between her legs that is not at all for him.

The motel turns back up so suddenly it seems like magic and she realizes she hasn’t been at all paying attention to where she is or where she’s going. It’s as though he’s taken on the burdens of time and place for her. She almost trips over him as he waits for her to take the steps first, and though she doesn’t doubt he’s got a chivalrous side, she senses he’s dawdling. She smells his sweat as she presses up the rickety wooden stairs and licks the sticky humid Oregon night off her unvarnished lips.

“Glad you changed your mind,” he says.

“About what?” About him, she thinks, about who he is, as though they’ve gotten to know each other so well somehow in the past forty five minutes. She reminds herself they’ve said almost nothing, but she can still feel his hands spanning the full length of her torso. His palms were just as warm as hers.

“About coming for the run,” he says, as if that were obvious and she guesses it was but – my, how his eyes change color. He’s a mood ring, a piece of tiger’s eye, a million things she officially never believed in but kept at her bedside. “Hope you didn’t do it just for me.”

“No,” she says and tells herself to leave it there, not say another word, let the silence rest between them. It’s an experiment she learned at fourteen and it has never failed. What a person does with a pause tells you everything you need to know. 

Mulder uses it for a hard glance at her lips – she’s sure, but that’s only because she’s been following his eyes so closely – and she turns her head to the side and laughs, puts her hands on her hips, feels like herself for the first time on this adventure.

“No, huh?” he asks and she knows now that neither of them are talking about the run, that they are speaking the same language without hardly speaking at all, and somehow she misses how significant that is. She looks at her sneakers caked with damp dirt and shakes her head.

“No, we shouldn’t,” she says softly, responsibly, to her great later regret, not realizing how closely he listens.


End file.
